The Decade of the Violin Concerto: New Music and the Performer in the 1930s

The 1930s saw an unusually rich harvest of violin concertos. An examination of this group of works provides a singular and seldom-considered angle from which to view the music history of the interwar period. In spite of the widely divergent styles and personal approaches, the works are united by certain factors that result from the choice of genre, with an attendant set of historical and technical constraints. In addition, the violinists who commissioned and performed the concertos influenced the compositions to a greater extent than often realized; therefore, in order to understand the works, we must take into consideration the artistic personalities of the respective performers as well. Many of the concertos were written for a new type of soloist, mostly from the younger generation, who had made a firm commitment to new music – something that some superstar violinists were unwilling to do. The concertos offer good opportunities to study the relationships between composer and performer, still a somewhat neglected topic in musicological studies.

D-Minor Concertos and Symphonies of the Brahms–Schumann Circle in the 1850s: Cross-Relationships and the Influence of Beethoven

This article examines cross-relationships and mutual influences in the D-minor symphonies and concertos written in the 1850s by a close-knit circle of composers: Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, and their friends Joseph Joachim, Julius Otto Grimm and Albert Dietrich. Outlining the overlapping compositional timelines of Brahms's First Piano Concerto (at one point a candidate to become his first symphonic work), the violin concertos of Joachim and Schumann, and the symphonies of Grimm and Dietrich, it demonstrates that the pieces were shared among the composers during their periods of composition and explores musical correspondences indicating mutual influences both among the composers and from other specific works. The musical choices involved in this group of pieces seem to point to an underlying backdrop of Beethovenian influence involving specific works from Beethoven's body of orchestral music, an oeuvre concluding with an unforgettable symphonic work in D minor—to which the younger generation's collection of works may relate symbolically. This study not only emphasizes the central role that Beethoven played in the minds of these composers in the mid-1850s, but also underscores the musical intimacy that extended from the social intimacy of the composers in the Brahms–Schumann circle.

Legacies

This chapter reflects on the legacies of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D Minor (op. 47), noting the establishment of the Sibelius Violin Competition and listing violin concertos composed by Finnish composers after Sibelius. It discusses concerto writing as an exploration of the relationship between soloist and orchestra. By situating virtuosity as a trope in relational thought within philosophical discourses on human tendencies, this chapter argues that a politics of possibility emerges because the element of risk in a virtuoso’s performance is haunted by a moral drama played out on public stages with uncertain outcomes. This chapter, and the book as a whole, ends by moving away from a political view of the concerto to the question of how performing traditions are formed over time. The chapter concludes with a reading of the Sibelius violin concerto within the long ecological histories of musical transmission.

Melody of S. Prokofiev as the main feature of his style (on the examples of Concerts No. 1 and No. 2 for violin and orchestra)

The purpose of the article is to analyze the violin concertos No. 1and No. 2, to find and explore the characteristic signs of S. Prokofievʼsmelody, lyrics, cantilenas, and ways of its construction. One of the taskswill be to discover their differences, using the example of concerts to showthe evolution of melody development by S. Prokofiev. Find thecharacteristics of his melody with works that were created in the same timeinterval along with the violin concertos. The methods are based on a comprehensive analysis of violin concertos; the historical and structurallyanalytical methods are used to track the evolution of the melody ofS. Prokofiev. Scientific novelty claims relevance because, unfortunately,very little attention is paid to the unique lyrics of Prokofiev, which standsout very clearly among other composers. Therefore, the study of thecharacteristics of the canted melody reveals the melodic style in itsmainstream. Especially since it is the cantilena that contains the mostimportant artistic discoveries of the composer in the field of melody, this iswhere the peculiarity of his melodic thinking manifested itself.Conclusions. Prokofiev was one of the first composers of the twentiethcentury, who brought the violin art back to its natural, for centuries acertain lyrical-emotional direction. The violin in his works appears mostoften in the role of „actorˮ, who predominantly distinctly „singsˮ. Thisfeature is inextricably linked with the lyrical direction – very strong in allProkofievʼs works. The lyrical direction, we can assume, dominatesProkofievʼs entire violin heritage. His innovation in the field of updatingthe melody from the inside consisted in updating its imaginative,intonational, mode. Over the years, the Prokofievʼs violin style haschanged, reflecting the general evolution of its artistic and aestheticprinciples. The last period of his work was marked by the desire forsimplicity, clarity of musical thinking, and hence to even greater modesty,transparent texture, and wise savings in the means of expression.